A new president had his inauguration in Washington. Christopher Hitchens called. “Clinton is definitely pro-you,” he said. “That’s a sure thing.” John Leonard published a piece in The Nation recommending that the incoming president, who was known to be a serious reader and had said that his favorite book was García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, should read The Satanic Verses.
The Secret Policeman’s Balls were fund-raising benefits for Amnesty International in the 1980s, but the comedians and musicians who took part were almost certainly not informed that the secret policemen really did have a ball—or at least a sizable bash. Every winter, in February or so, the “A” Squad’s annual party took over Peelers, the large bar/restaurant space on an upper floor of New Scotland Yard, and the guest list was unlike any other in London. Everyone who was receiving or had ever received protection was invited, and all of these “principals” did their best to attend, as a way of thanking the officers who had looked after them. Prime ministers past and present, Northern Ireland secretaries of state, defense ministers, foreign secretaries of both major parties gossiped and boozed with prot officers and OFDs. In addition the protection teams were allowed to invite a few of their principals’ friends and associates who had been especially helpful. It made for quite a room.
He would say in those years that if he ever wrote the story of his life he would call it Back Doors of the World. Anybody could walk in the front door. You really had to be somebody to get in through the kitchen door, the staff entrance, the rear window, the garbage chute. Even when he was taken to New Scotland Yard for the Secret Policemen’s Ball he went in through the underground parking garage and was spirited upstairs in an elevator locked off for his use. The other guests used the main entrance but he was the rear-entry guy. But once at Peelers he was a part of that happy throng—happy, in part, because the only drinks on offer appeared to be enormous glasses of scotch or gin—and all “his” team members came up to greet him with a cheery “Joe!”
The protection officers took especial delight in putting together principals who would never ordinarily meet, just to see what happened. They steered him through the crowd to where a frail old man with the remnants of a famous mustache stood, slightly stooped, beside his solicitous wife. He had in fact once run into Enoch Powell before, back in the 1970s when he had been living in Clarissa’s house on Lower Belgrave Street. He had gone into the local newspaper shop, Quinlan’s, to buy a paper and there was Powell coming out toward him, Powell at the height of his demon-eyed fame, just a few years after the anti-immigrant “rivers of blood” speech that destroyed his political career. Like the Roman I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood, he had said, expressing every British racist’s fear of dusky foreigners. That day at Quinlan’s newspaper shop the nonviolent young immigrant facing the notorious Enoch had seriously considered punching him in the nose, and had always been a little disappointed with himself that he had not. But Lower Belgrave Street was full of people in need of a bloody nose—Madame Somoza, the Nicaraguan dictator’s wife, next door at number 35 and those nice Lucans at number 46 (Lord Lucan, at that time, had not yet tried to murder his wife, killing the nanny instead; but he was working up to it). Once you started punching people it would be hard to know where to stop. It had probably been a good idea to walk away from Enoch of the glittering eyeballs and post-Hitlerian upper lip.
And twenty years later here Powell was again. “No,” he said to his protectors. “On the whole, I’d prefer not to.” Then came cries of “Oh, go on Joe, he’s an old geezer now,” and the one that got through his defenses, “Mrs. Powell, you see, Joe,” said Stanley Doll, “it’s a hard life for her, looking after the old boy. She really wants to meet you. It would mean a lot.” So it was Margaret Powell he and Elizabeth agreed to meet. She had lived in Karachi as a young person, in the same neighborhood as members of his own family, and wanted to chat about the old days. Old Enoch stood beside her stooped and nodding and silent, too decrepit to be worth punching anymore. After a courteous interval he made his excuses, took Elizabeth by the elbow, turned away, and there was Margaret Thatcher looking right at him with her handbag and lacquered hair and her crooked little smile.
He would never have guessed that the Iron Lady was a touchy-feely person. Throughout their brief conversation the former prime minister was putting her hands on him. Hello, dear, her hand resting lightly on the back of his hand, how are you getting along, her hand beginning to caress his forearm, are these wonderful men taking good care of you?, her hand on his shoulder now, he had better speak, he told himself, before she started caressing his cheek. “Yes, thank you,” he said, and she ducked her head in that famous bobble-head nod. Good, good, the hand was caressing his arm again, well, you look after yourself, and that would have been it, except that Elizabeth interrupted to ask, very firmly, what the British government proposed to do to end the threats. Lady Thatcher looked mildly surprised to find such tough words emerging from the mouth of this pretty young thing, and her body stiffened just a little. Oh, my dear, and now it was Elizabeth she was caressing, yes, it must be very worrying for you, but I’m afraid nothing will really change until there’s a change of regime in Tehran. “That’s it?” Elizabeth said. “That’s your policy?” The Thatcher hand withdrew. The sharp gaze wandered off and focused on infinity. There was a vague nod and a trailing Mmm noise and then she was gone.
Elizabeth was angry for the rest of the evening. That’s it? That’s their whole plan? But he thought of Margaret Thatcher caressing his arm, and smiled.
The fourth anniversary of the fatwa was as heated as ever. The usual blood-curdling noises emanated from Tehran, where Ayatollah Khamenei, President Rafsanjani, Nateq-Nouri, the Speaker of the Majlis and others were plainly rattled by the increasing volume of official objections to their murderous little plan. Their menaces were answered in the U.S. Congress, at the UN Commission for Human Rights, and even by the British government. Douglas Hurd spoke up in Strasbourg and his deputy Douglas Hogg spoke in Geneva, identifying the Rushdie case as a “human rights issue of great importance.” An oil deal with Iran was being blocked in Norway; a billion-dollar line of credit promised by Canada to Iran had also been blocked. He himself was in an unexpected place: delivering the sermon—or, since he was not a man of the cloth, the address—from the pulpit of King’s College Chapel.
Before he began to speak the dean of King’s warned him about the echo. “Leave gaps after every few words,” he said, “or the reverberations will make you inaudible.” He felt that he was being let into a mystery: So that was why sermons always sounded like that. “To stand—in this house—is to be reminded—of what is most beautiful—about religious faith,” he began, and thought, I sound like an archbishop. He pressed on, to speak in the house of God about the virtues of the secular, and to lament the loss of others who had fought the good fight—Farag Fouda in Egypt, and now Turkey’s most popular journalist, Ugur Mumcu, assassinated by a bomb in his car. The ruthlessness of the godly invalidated their claims of virtue. “Just as King’s Chapel—may be taken—as a symbol—of what is best—about religion,” he said in his best ecclesiastical diction, “so the fatwa—has become—a symbol—of what is worst. The fatwa itself—may be seen—as a set—of modern satanic verses. In the fatwa—once again—evil—takes on the guise—of virtue—and the faithful—are—deceived.”
On February 26, 1993, the World Trade Center in New York was bombed by a group led by a Kuwaiti man called Ramzi Yousef. Six people died, over a thousand were injured, but the towers did not fall.
Friends were telling him the campaign was becoming very effective and he was doing very well but he was too often in the grip of what Winston Churchill had called the “black dog” of depression. Out there in the world he could fight, he had taught himself to do what had to be done. When he got home he often fell apart and it was Elizabeth who had to deal with the wreckage. David Gore-Booth told him that the Foreign Office had talked to British Airwa
ys but the airline was determinedly refusing to carry him. Tom Phillips had finished his portrait of Mr. Chirpy and offered it to the National Portrait Gallery, which decided not to acquire it “at this time.” Sometimes when news of this sort arrived he drank too much—he had never been a big drinker before the fatwa—and then his demons could not be resisted and there was a certain amount of booze-induced bad temper. Tom Phillips had given him the Mr. Chirpy portrait, and when he tried to hang it, and found his toolbox missing, he burst into an excessive rage that Elizabeth found unbearable, and she collapsed in floods of tears. And she told him that the idea of giving up the protection was crazy and she would not live with him in an unprotected house. If he gave up the protection he would live there alone.
After that he was more careful of her feelings. She was a brave, loving woman and he was lucky to have her and he would not allow himself to screw things up. He decided to cut out alcohol altogether, and though he didn’t succeed entirely the nights of excess came to an end and moderation returned. He would not fulfill Marianne’s curse and turn into his alcoholic father. He refused to turn Elizabeth into another version of his own long-suffering mother.
Doris Lessing was writing her memoirs and called to discuss them. Rousseau’s way, she said, was the only way; you just had to tell the truth, to tell as much truth as possible. But scruples and hesitations were inevitable. “At that time, Salman, I was a pretty good-looking woman and there are implications in that fact which you may not have considered. The people with whom I had or almost had affairs … many of them were very well known and several of them are still alive. I do think of Rousseau,” she added, “and I hope this book is an emotionally honest work, but is it fair to be honest about other people’s emotions?” Anyway, she concluded, the real problems would be in volume two. She was still doing volume one, whose personages were all dead or “don’t care anymore.” With much giggling she went off to write, encouraging him to do the same. He wanted to say, but did not, that he was again imagining a life of not being a writer, thinking of the peace and stillness, perhaps even the joy, of that life. But he was resolved to finish the book he was writing. This one last sigh at least.
And the book was slowly progressing. In Cochin, Abraham Zogoiby and Aurora da Gama were falling in “pepper love.”
In mid-March he finally managed to fly to Paris. The fearsome men of the RAID surrounded him as he got off the plane and informed him that he had to do exactly, exactly, as they said. They took him at high speed to the Grande Arche de la Défense and there was Jack Lang, minister of culture and number two in the French government, waiting to greet him with Bernard-Henri Lévy and bring him to the auditorium. He tried not to think about the mammoth security operation all around the arche and to concentrate, instead, on the extraordinary gathering waiting for him, which appeared to be the entire French intelligentsia and political elite of the right as well as the left. (Except Mitterrand. Always, in those years in France, sauf Mitterrand.) Bernard Kouchner and Nicolas Sarkozy, Alain Finkielkraut and Jorge Semprún, Philippe Sollers and Elie Wiesel rubbed shoulders and behaved cordially to one another. Patrice Chéreau, Françoise Giroud, Michel Rocard, Ismail Kadare, Simone Veil—this was a mighty room.
Jack Lang, introducing the proceedings, said, “We must thank Salman Rushdie today, because he has united French culture.” That got a big laugh. Then for two hours there was an intense period of questioning. He hoped that he had made a good impression, but there was no time to find out if he had, because as soon as the meeting ended the RAID team hustled him out of the room and drove him away as fast as they could go. They were taking him to the British embassy, which, being technically British soil, was the only place in Paris where he was allowed to spend the night. One night. The British ambassador, Christopher Mallaby, greeted him with great friendship and courtesy and had even read some of his books. But it was also made clear that this was a one-off invitation. He could not think of the embassy as his hotel in Paris. The next morning he was driven to the airport and dismissed from France.
On his way to and from the embassy he was shocked to notice that the Place de la Concorde was closed to traffic. All the roads in and out of Concorde were blocked by policemen so that he, in his RAID motorcade, could rush across the place unimpeded. It made him sad. He did not want to be the person for whom Concorde was closed off. The motorcade passed a little café-bistro and everyone drinking coffee under its awning was staring in his direction, with curiosity and a little resentment mingling on their faces. I wonder, he thought, if I will ever again be one of those people drinking a cup of coffee on the sidewalk and watching the world go by.
The house was beautiful but it felt like a gilded cage. He had learned how to withstand the Islamic attacks on him; it was after all not surprising that fanatics and bigots should continue to behave like bigots and fanatics. It was harder to handle the non-Muslim British criticisms, which were mounting in volume, and the apparent duplicity of the Foreign Office and John Major’s government, which consistently promised one thing and did another. He wrote a furious article letting all the rage and disappointment show. Cooler heads—Elizabeth, Frances, Gillon—persuaded him not to publish it. He thought, looking back, that he had been wrong to take their advice. Every time he chose to remain silent during this period of his life—for example, during the year between the fatwa and the publication of “In Good Faith”—the silence afterward felt like a mistake.
On Monday 22nd February, the prime minister’s office announced that Mr. Major had agreed in principle to a meeting with me, as a demonstration of the government’s determination to stand up for freedom of expression and for the right of its citizens not to be murdered by thugs in the pay of a foreign power. More recently a date was set for that meeting. Immediately a vociferous Tory backbench campaign sought to have the meeting canceled, because of its interference with Britain’s “partnership” with the murderous mullahs of Tehran. The date—which I had been assured was “as firm as can be”—has today been postponed without explanation. By a curious coincidence, a proposed British trade delegation to Iran in early May can now take place without embarrassment. Iran is hailing this visit—the first such mission in the fourteen years since the Khomeini revolution—as a “breakthrough” in relations. Its news agency states that the British have promised that lines of credit will be made available.
It is becoming harder to retain confidence in the Foreign Office’s decision to launch a new “high profile” international initiative against the notorious fatwa. For not only are we scurrying off to do business with the tyrannical regime that the U.S. administration calls an “international outlaw” and brands as the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, but we also propose to lend that regime the money with which to do business with us. Meanwhile, I gather I am to be offered a new date for my little meeting. But nobody from No. 10 Downing Street has spoken or written to me.
The Tory “anti-Rushdie” pressure group—its very description demonstrates its members’ desire to turn this into an issue of personality rather than principle—includes Sir Edward Heath and Emma Nicholson, as well as that well-known apologist for Iranian interests, Peter Temple-Morris. Emma Nicholson tells us that she has grown to “respect and like” the Iranian regime (whose record of killing, maiming and torturing its own people has recently been condemned by the United Nations as being among the worst in the world), while Sir Edward, still protected by Special Branch because, twenty years ago, the British people suffered under his disastrous premiership, criticizes the decision to offer similar protection to a fellow Briton who is presently in greater danger than himself. All these persons agree on one point: The crisis is my fault. Never mind that over two hundred of the most prominent Iranians in exile have signed a statement of absolute support for me. That writers, thinkers, journalists and academics throughout the Muslim world—where the attack upon dissenting, progressive and above all secularist ideas is daily gathering force—have told the British media that “to defe
nd Rushdie is to defend us.” That The Satanic Verses, a legitimate work of the free imagination, has many defenders (and where there are at least two views why should the book burners have the last word?), or that its opponents have felt no need to understand it.
Iranian officials have admitted that Khomeini never so much as saw a copy of the novel. Islamic jurisprudents have stated that the fatwa contradicts Islamic law, never mind international law. Meanwhile, the Iranian press is offering a prize of sixteen gold pieces and a pilgrimage to Mecca for a cartoon “proving” that The Satanic Verses is not a novel at all, but a carefully engineered Western conspiracy against Islam. Does this whole affair not feel, at times, like the blackest of black comedy—a circus sideshow enacted by murderous clowns?
In the last four years I have been slandered by many people. I do not intend to keep turning the other cheek. If it was proper to attack those on the left who were the fellow travelers of Communism, and those on the right who sought to appease the Nazis, then the friends of revolutionary Iran—businessmen, politicians or British fundamentalists—deserve to be treated with equal contempt.
I believe we have reached a turning point. Either we are serious about defending freedom, or we are not. If we are, then I hope Mr. Major will very soon be willing to stand up and be counted as he has promised. I should very much like to discuss with him how pressure on Iran can be increased—in the EC, through the Commonwealth and the UN, at the World Court. Iran needs us more than we need Iran. Instead of quaking when the mullahs threaten to cut trade links, let us be the ones to turn the economic screws. I have discovered, in my conversations across Europe and North America, widespread all-party interest in the idea of a ban on offering credit to Iran, as a first stage. But everyone is waiting for the British government to take a lead. In today’s newspaper, however, Bernard Levin suggests that fully two-thirds of all Tory MPs would be delighted if Iranian assassins succeeded in killing me. If these MPs truly represent the nation—if we are so unconcerned about our liberties—then so be it: Lift the protection, disclose my whereabouts and let the bullets come. One way or the other. Let’s make up our minds.